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| Jul - Posts by LocalH |
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LocalH Member Level: 12     Posts: 1/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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| I recently re-found my old copy of the GH2 10-song demo, and recently got a much improved method for loading hacked and custom discs on my PS2, so in the coming days I plan to document things that are either: A) in the demo and used but different to the retail, B) in the demo but unused normally, either locked behind a menu or not used at all, and C) in the demo but completely unused. I also have the four-song demo from OPM110, which is even earlier, but there's less to do as there are really only four songs on disc (unlike the 10-song demo which actually contains 31 songs). It has an interesting early attempt at practice mode that doesn't use the separate VGS files and offers more speeds, but sounds like ass. Normally it wouldn't help that the early demo has a watchdog timer that will reboot to the OPM disc's main menu if you leave it sitting still on a menu for 60 seconds, but I've already disabled that =P
I have nothing compiled up to post ATM, but since noone else has documented these types of things, I figure it's about time. One question - I currently have no way to capture in-game screenshots, and I really, REALLY don't want to slog through using PCSX2 for screenshots. For those types of shots, would it be acceptable for me to attempt to take the best possible shot I can get off-screen? For graphic assets of course, I will convert to PNG and upload directly. After I do some good work on GH2, I might grab my old GH1 copy and dig out the things that were unused or from earlier betas (like a couple of really old "2x" and "4x" graphics that I think match up to the really early videos in function, if not in form). |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 2/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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Originally posted by Gig Yeah, unfortunately I did mean photographs off-screen. If it helps, I might be able to do it with a tripod and an HD video camera (a good one, with manual exposure, white balance, and focus), on an HDTV (since the demos all have hidden widescreen functions, this is good). Here is an example of the quality I'll get when extracting 1080i frames from such a video, and I think it might be acceptable (and if I gain the ability to directly capture frames in the future then they could be replaced). It'll be a little while before I'm even ready to put up a page or anything, as I'm going to basically just go through and compile everything I can find that would be relevant, as there's actually quite a bit of stuff, including unused textures and lots of GH1 leftovers. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 3/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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| I'll have to throw up some of the more major stuff, but I can mention a few things now (unless specified, this stuff is from the 10-song demo, henceforth called the late demo):
1) An early name for Casey Lynch was "Gina Hazard". I don't remember ever seeing that mentioned in press, unlike the early names for Eddie Knox (Dax Deville and King Kendall). This was borne out by a Google search for "Gina Hazard" "Guitar Hero". Also, her description in career mode actually references the generic name "Rocker" (all characters have a generic name used internally, such as "Glam" for Izzy or "Deth" for Lars). 2) The Grim Ripper is technically "present" in that he is selectable in career mode (but you have to hack an unlock all cheat code into the game, as you can't move past the first tier and so can't get enough money to buy him), but attempting to play a song with him set as your character causes the game to freeze on the loading screen). 3) HMX really screwed some fans with the early demo by locking away the entire video options menu, since there are working options for lefty flip, widescreen, and prog scan. Both demos also contains an early "sync offset" setting, which is only functional in the late demo (and doesn't require restarting the song to modify!) 4) The career mode store is quite broken in this build. The models for the guitars display off the left-hand side of the screen (if at all), none of the character models load for purchaseable characters or outfits, with the exception of Grim, but he shows up as a tiny headless model instead of the normal one. I'm thinking that the demo actually includes the GH1 version of Grim, which IIRC had to be handled separately as he was much bigger than the other characters. 5) As mentioned earlier, the late demo actually contains 31 songs (and duplicate references to those to pad out the setlist to 40 songs). However, thanks to the locking away of career mode, Quick Play just allows access to the first two tiers, just as always. I thought it was interesting that rather than specifically locking away all but 10 songs, they just relied on the way things already worked (which explains why I spent 45 minutes looking for a way to make all the songs show up before I thought of unlocking the menus). Only one of the songs present did not appear on the retail game (Bang Your Head by Quiet Riot), although it did later appear on GH80s, with the first solo removed (I can see why, it's fairly difficult for the time period). This marks the only song in the HMX GH series that was completely cut from the game and removed from the disc, that we have access to the chart for (*Trippolette and Graveyard Shift were of course still on the GH1 disc, and noone has gotten hold of the chart for I Want Candy from the GH80s review build that I just know is floating around out there in the wild somewhere, but haven't seen it available) More later, I have some stuff I've got to take care of, and after that I've got to go through and extract some graphics from the .milo_ps2 files. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 4/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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| Nothing implemented, but I saw those references, too. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 5/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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| Just bumping this to let you guys know:
1) I'm still working on gathering up interesting facts, assets, and screenshots. On the latter point, 2) I found a remote that will work with my DVD recorder, so now I can finalize discs (meaning that I can get much better screenshots than even an HD camera on an HDTV with autofocus and autoexposure turned off) I plan to have something up within the week, at least. I don't normally do much wiki editing in general, so I'm using this as an opportunity to "get into the groove", so to speak, with the personality and style of TCRF. I'm currently having problems getting my menu-hacked copy of the early GH2 demo to boot, and I think it may be due to changes made between Open PS2 Loader 0.7 and 0.8 (plan on testing this with an image of the original disc, unmodded). If OPL fails to boot my original, then it looks like I'll have to crack out the trusty old ESR patcher and do this from a physical disc. Luckily, OPL uses normal ISO files when loading games from the network, so all I have to do is patch my already-existing hacked ISO and burn it. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 6/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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| Ok, currently in the process of making chart images similar to this one for all the songs in the early demo, the late demo, and the relevant ones on the retail disc. I plan on doing something similar to that awesome beta Wendy's castle image on the SMW page.
Only one small snag, but I'm just going to have to deal with it - the tool I'm using to generate chart images is primarily used nowadays for RB charts, and so when generating GH2 charts, it doesn't properly display HO/POs anymore. The only song this should be relevant on is Monkey Wrench, which used the default HO/PO threshold of 170 ticks in the late demo, but was changed to 250 ticks for retail. Ok, two small snags - the tool I'm using apparently doesn't like the late demo's Jessica chart - it basically took a big shit over the first 18 bars or so. This did not happen with the retail Jessica chart. I'm waiting on the tool's author to get back to me on the issue, might end up having to slight edit the MIDI to make this not happen, but it shouldn't involve editing the actual gems or the star power demarcation, but there's probably something else in there this tool doesn't like. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 7/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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| Slight bump, but it was still on page 1 of the forum and I actually have some relevant info (old, but relevant).
I was recently (like, yesterday) over at the English Amiga Board reading a thread about messages hidden in games for crackers to find, and guess what I read in a post from 2006? Originally posted by "Conqueror" Which of course would be the linked Sid Mania demo from the first reply in this thread. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 8/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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| Huge bump, but it's my topic and somewhat relevant so bite me.
As some of you may have seen, I've worked on the GH1 page a bit since it was already there. Especially on the notes page, got some stuff dumped from the DTBs. Got a little more to dump along with a few images, and then I'll start on a page for the early GH2 demo. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 9/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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I figured, I just wanted to take the opportunity to say bite me. 
I have also learned of the existence of at least one copy of the GH2 E3 build in private hands. I have reason to believe it is earlier than the OPM demo yet contains more songs due to lack of public release. I'd be interested to see if any menus are locked, and if so what's behind the lock
This E3 build also allegedly contains a set of "techsongs" which were never found on any other build of any GH game. Perhaps it may also hold the key (no pun intended) to the debug mode? Give me a little bit and I'll package up the tools (Windows) I'm using, so that anyone with any HMX GH-series disc can look through stuff themselves. Includes a mix of commandline and GUI tools. I suck at modern programming but I'd like to see a tool that could directly convert the images to RGBA PNG (which would include expanding 7-bit alpha to 8-bit). Right now image conversion is kinda...fun, to say the least. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 10/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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| That's interesting that you find RB easier, as GH has a much looser timing window. The 5-lane guitar on RB3 has direct heritage to the original GH1 engin, and I think shares the same timing window (although I could be a bit off, they may have changed the window once for GH2 but it's more or less been the same since, although I've heard that RB3 fixes the issue where timing windows shrink as notes get closer together). |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 11/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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bit of an update regarding the early GH2 demo. As I mentioned earlier, I had been unable for quite a while to boot the demo using OPL (and trying to hack games on the PS2 and using physical discs fucking blows). Recently, I found a patch someone had made for OPL that allows setting an arbitrary main ELF filename (for use with demoscene productions that did not use the standard SL?S.XXX_XX naming) and it also works to use ELF files in subdirectories as the main boot ELF, which I think was the problem with the OPM110 disc (it had a menu that would then launch the desired demo from the disc, and this menu never loaded after OPL v0.7). Long story short, I can now boot the early demo without using my optical drive again  Dunno if this might come in handy for any other games for TCRF purposes, but if anyone wants my patched OPL binary, just let me know and I'll upload it. Time to go digging through the early GH2 UI scripting.
Yeah, I know, I got lazy and never uploaded said tools, nor have I really had much time to work on even the GH1 page thanks to RL bullshit. To be honest, GH1 is kinda boring, not much leftover shit to extract that I can find. Plus the engine sucks ass =P |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 12/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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| Code also exists in EWJ1 SNES version, as given by Apr 1995 issue of Game Players: Pause then Left+A, B, X, A, A, B, X, A.
Untested by me personally. According to GP screenshots, functionally identical tothe MD version, visually differences are: 1) Build date is August 23, 1994 2) "DAVID PERRY'S PRIVATE CHEAT MODE" in MD version replaced by Shiny's U.S. telephone and fax numbers 3) All numerical values are in hex, similar to EWJ2 SNES |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 13/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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Originally posted by Montas1992 Speaking of that, anyone know how to get it running on a 4.3U Wii? I'm just now getting into Wii hacking and I don't know how to change the region of a given WAD. I was able to install it but it wouldn't run. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 14/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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| ROFL good one. Anyway, I got the prototype working so never mind. One further comment: Good GOD that minecart level really was trash. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 15/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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Originally posted by Eon I believe that come from the game, same as the Home menu itself. I'm pretty sure that some of the earliest Wii games depict the remote without the jacket on this screen. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 16/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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Originally posted by Foxhack According to the post, it's VHS, so I doubt composite or s-video matters that much. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 17/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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Originally posted by RickOriginally posted by SamuelEarl666 I've been meaning to record some footage from the Guitar Hero II demos that are "out there". I recently took a Hauppauge WinTV card out of an old machine my uncle owned, before he scrapped it, and installed it into my current machine. Sometime soon, I'll have to bring my PS2 back from my girlfriend's house and make some captures. I would have done it before now but I'd found out that my DVD recorder/VHS combo pretty much went tits up - it won't play VHS tapes in color anymore, and it doesn't seem to accept any disc I try to put in it, whether blank, burnt, or pressed. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 18/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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Originally posted by Foxhack Actually, the one I have was pretty good for this type of thing when it was working. It has an "XP" setting for recording on DVD which limits it to something like one hour per single-layer disc. Moot point, however, since it doesn't work anymore. Originally posted by Foxhack Well, I would try PCSX2, but last I checked it has some slight visual anomalies with the retail version of GH2, and the demos have their own visual anomalies in places on the hardware (due to being incomplete), so in this case I'll prefer to capture from my PS2. My capture card does MPEG-2, I think in hardware, as I've never had it drop a single frame ever, but it does it in excellent quality - I have several episodes of a half-hour game show on my hard drive with commercials edited out (losslessly edited, so minimal recompression of frames only around the edit points to create new GOPs as needed), which comes out to 1.35GB for 21:29 of video, audio is 384kbps MPEG-1 layer 2. That's 1,452,394,500 bytes for 1289 seconds of A/V, or an average bitrate of 1,126,761 bytes per second, in this case roughly 8802kbps for both audio and video, if you subtract 384kbps CBR from that's almost 8.5Mbps just for video. I'll do some test captures when I do get my PS2 back over here and see how the quality is with Guitar Hero. In this case, to save space on the server, I would like to request permission to upload still shots captured with my card as highest quality JPG instead of PNG. Reason being, the image is already compressed coming into my computer, which means there will be minor compression artifacts and chroma downsampling from the ideal RGB 4:4:4 capture. Thus, converting these stills to PNG would only make larger files, without any of the usual PNG benefits. I'll be using s-video to capture, as that's the best my capture card supports (I do have a Firewire capture box that supports 480i component, but it hardware compresses to 25Mbps DV, which in NTSC land has arguably worse chroma downsampling [4:1:1, or 4 times wider chroma pixels than luma] than MPEG-2 [4:2:0, which can have issues with interlaced material if improperly processed, which I will take care not to do], negating any possible benefits to using component over s-video, and my PC doesn't even have a Firewire port). Unless someone wants to buy me a good PCI-E component capture card? j/k |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 19/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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| My thought is that the 2MB copy that was found on a tall board has a better chance of being "real" than the short boards. Then again, that cart had part of some build of TMNT: Tournament Fighters on it (or some other TMNT game, I'm re-reading up on it now, my guess is some of the chips were replaced after burning Crackers to them and the upper 1MB was just left alone). Has anyone else heard of a Sega tall board containing a smaller game and the upper part of a totally different game, besides this one?
Unfortunately (unless the Crackers part is bit-identical), everyone seems to treat that 2MB dump as an "overdump" which is completely and utterly wrong. |
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LocalH Member Level: 12 Posts: 20/31 EXP: 6488 For next: 1433 Since: 12-06-10 Since last post: 118 days Last activity: 127 days
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Originally posted by Aeonic Butterfly The Sonic Spinball prototype, which was not a clean dump of the original cartridge when the Sonic scene got hold of it (although I think the only thing that was modified in the actual Spinball data was the start vector, other than that the modifications were just appended to the end). On the end of that ROM, there was also 112KB of a Sub-Terrania prototype in SMD format. The Sub-Terrania ROM had a Fairlight crack intro that was disabled, according to X-Cult. As well, the scene discovered that the Spinball proto had also been slightly re-modified to disable a crack intro that was appended to the game by Premiere, the group that released the ROM originally. It was fairly simple to re-enable that crack intro, it was literally just a hack of the start vector in the main ROM header. I would be very, very surprised if this Sub-Terrania data was on the original cart that the Spinball proto was dumped from, given the presence of SMD-format data as well as two crack intros. I don't remember the file size of the Spinball proto after removing the 112KB of Sub-Terrania, but it's always possible I guess that the Spinball proto needed padding to work on the copiers of the time, and they may have taken a ROM already in SMD format to pad it so that it wouldn't be that obvious to the end users what the data was (as it would then be double-interleaved after putting the whole combined ROM into SMD format). That's just a hypothesis, though, the only way to be sure would be to track down people who were responsible for the ROM's original scene release and ask them. |
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| Jul - Posts by LocalH |
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Acmlmboard - 07/23/2013 b378.03
©2000-2013 Acmlm, Xkeeper, Inuyasha, et al. |
